"You gotta make a change, It's time for us as a people to start making some changes, lets change the way we eat, lets change the way we live, and lets change the way we treat each other. You see the old way wasn't working so its on us, to do what we gotta do to survive" Tupac Shakur

How are we going to change, when we're so destructive to
each other and don't trust each other. At times I wonder if its possible that a
people can change. It's been said that "We ain't neva gonna change, we're
like crabs in a barrel" Recent history shows that it takes something very
dramatic, that will make us change. If Four Hundred years of being
enslaved hasn't changed us, I don't know what will. Today in most of our
communities we worry more about the brotha shooting us then the white man. We
have become a self destructive people and it seems that we rather build Mega
Churches then build each other up.

We can't continue to blame the white man for things that we are capable of
changing ourselves. We have to start, doing for self and learning how did we
get, to where we are now, and what can
we do to create change. I'm talking about the type of change that I've
mentioned on these pages. You know what each one of us have to change and if
others see a change in how we treat each other and respect each other then
others will follow. The chains of slavery are still on our minds and these
shackles are doing us more harm then the physical shackles we once had. Also
everyone who talks about change ain't about change, so beware. So let's heal
ourselves.

Amos Wilson: Black On Black Violence

THE IDENTITY CRISIS OF THE BLACK ON BLACK CRIMINAL:

Negroes also have been not too subtly defined by the White majority in America
as Public Enemy Number One in the so-called war against crime. To the extent
this is true, their dominant contribution to our crime problem has been
ensured. The conscious or unconscious tendency among middle class whites to
equate Negroes with crime has given the latter a final shove into total
degradation and alienation, providing a powerful nothing-to-lose incentive to
criminal acts. EDWIN SCHUR Our Criminal Society

FOR THE BLACK-ON-BLACK VIOLENT CRIMINAL, identification with the White
supremacist aggressor community is never complete, nor is his dis-identification
with the victimized African American community. The Black-on-Black criminal is
a hybrid, a victimized aggressor one motivated and rationalized by his
perceived victimization. Like all Africans subject to aggressive European
domination he is neither Peter nor Paul. He is caught between the horns of an
un-resolvable dilemma. He can never be a White man in the truest sense of the
term, and he unalterably refuses to be a Black man in the true sense of the
term. Having internalized the Eurocentric definition of what it means to be
African  all negative  as well as having observed the material losses, social
ostracism, victimization, rejection, etc., that Europeans and others have
applied to those who identify themselves as African, he scurries to the safety
of ethnic ambiguity or self- alienation. What in-between identity is chosen
by the average African American, i.e., how much and what aspects of the White
American racist aggressor and the Black victim he chooses to meld into his
ambivalent personal identity, depends on many factors.

We must note that the Black-on-Black criminal as well as the average African
American suffer most fundamentally from a chronically painful identity crisis
from which they seek to find relief and/or escape. Many pathways to, and forms
of relief are chosen, some more self-destructive and antisocial than others,
all neurotic: many vacillating from one extreme to the other. Therefore, the
average African American is synthetic, a Frankenstein creation of the
American Dilemma. His synthetic identity is suffused with ambivalence, and
based on misconceptions. For it is forged from two major falsified and
self-serving Eurocentric projections  a projectively inflated, confabulated,
European image and a complementary deflated, scandalized, apparently and
repulsively exposed African image. Consequently, the victimized African with no
positive African identity, and his identification with the false image of the
European, can only achieve alienation from reality no matter how normal,
law- abiding, abnormal, or criminal he may appear to be.

The Black-on-Black violent criminal, in forging his personality chooses to
identify with, for whatever reasons, the violent, victimizing aspects of his
White American racist aggressor, and attempts to reject or escape from his
eurocentrically falsified, victimized African American image. In so doing he
paradoxically incarnates and fulfills the eurocentrically projected stereotype
of himself as criminal. His identification with his White suprema cist
aggressor is partial because he, on some subconscious level of his being,
recognizes his own victimization by the aggressor, and seeks to revenge or
compensate for it. He therefore aggressively or through subterfuge rejects the
moral, ethical values and preachments of his White supremacist aggressors.

He recognizes they are designed not to be applied to their own behavior and
attitudes toward him, but are designed to prevent his retaliation against them
and to make his victimization and exploitation more efficient and trouble-free.
The violent Black-on- Black criminal feels the common African American
ambivalence more intensely than do non-criminal African Americans. He is most
sensitive to it and therefore represses it more deeply. He dissociates or
splits off the pain from the emotion and only feels the vague indefinable
frustration, invisible restraining forces, the anger, the restlessness,
agitation, irritation and moodiness; the boredom, sense of purposelessness and
meaninglessness, the painful states of consciousness that cry out from
alienation and for violent expression.

Thus, the violent Black-on-Black criminal in many instances, being neither
Black nor White, is but an ambivalent empty shell of a man whose
bottomlessness, vacuity, numbness, and lack of definition are the sources of
his insatiable need to fashion an identity from current fads, eccentric dress
and behavior. His voracious and rapacious greed, his need to consume
conspicuous!y, to become a gluttonous devourer of things and people, reflects
his ethnic hollowness. His need to intensify the painful feelings of others are
emblematic of his need to feel something within himself, to have someone else
know the pain he has so deeply buried within. He kills the other so as to share
his own death of spirit, humanity and deadness with someone else. His need to
define reality and himself outside the consensus of others reflects his
unrealistic definition by others, and his attempts to define himself through
violent intrusion into their reality.

The partial or complete fulfillment of these needs brings about in him an
overpowering sense of excitement, aliveness, power, sensuality, imperial
authority and masculinity (which he often equates with the capacity to injure
and destroy others). Though he transcends the restricted world that surrounds him,
he also experiences, simultaneously, an unconscious sense of guilt and
self-condemnation. He cannot escape his ambivalence. Since his antisocial acts
are the only ones which he assumes permit him to experience the overwhelmingly
positive feelings just described (even his material acquisitions are only
instrumental to evoking desirable feelings), and since his nympho maniacal
emptiness rapidly consumes these feelings, his hunger too soon becomes more
painfully insistent.

To repress his unconscious feelings of guilt, isolation, alienation and
self-condemnation that threaten to break through to consciousness, he becomes
helplessly addicted to those intoxicating feelings and the violent, antisocial
means by which they are ameliorated. Even if he does not enjoy his use of
violence, the Black-on-Black violent criminal sees it as instrumental to
attaining the feelings to which he is addicted. As such, violence is at least
secondarily positively reinforcing.

POVERTY AND CRIME:

The reader should note that the foregoing discussion is not solely an
intrapsychic, blaming the victim exposition. The author does not
differentiate between outside and inside as far as human psychology is
concerned, even though didactic and linguistic styles and limitations make it
appear so. The human being, as are all things, is continuous with the rest of
the universe. The environment, objects whether living or nonliving, human or
nonhuman, concrete or abstract, intrude into the human psyche and body via the
media of feelings. The psyche transduces the material, dynamic, and abstract
world in terms of feelings. It is to these feelings that the mind, body, and
personality respond, process, and feed forward into consciousness and the world.

The assertion that mediating values, perspectives, etc., and the feelings they
help to produce motivate criminal behavior, should not be construed to imply
that conditions such as poverty do not contribute to criminality to a
substantial degree. Furthermore, it should not be construed to imply that
attitudes, values, etc., need only be changed in order to change the criminal
behavior of those who live in poverty without improving poverty conditions
themselves.

A condition and the experiential reactions it appears to evoke are derivative of
the synthesization of the individuals perception of his real physical,
behavioral, social environment and the organized experiences and the
motivations he brings into that environment. Consequently, a significant change
in one stimulates related changes in the other and vice versa.

Indeed, the conditions under which the individual lives may significantly
affect those with whom he associates; the perspectives, attitudes and values he
internalizes, provide or fail to provide the resources, opportunities and other
amenities, the patterns of which determine whether or not he engages in
criminal behavior. The conditions under which African Americans live have been
deliberately instituted by White America in order to accomplish definite ends.
Joel Kovel speaks to this when he states that:
..throughout our history, whites have created the institutions by which black
people are forced to live, and which force them to live in a certain way,
almost invariably so as to foster just that constellation of unworthy traits.
From slavery itself to modern welfare systems, this has been the enduring
pattern, reinforced in popular culture and education by panoply of stereotypes
along the same lines.
The result of these cultural manipulations has been to ensure to the black
person a pre-assigned degraded role, no matter where he turned.

Poverty in the United States
is a crime committed against the African American population. White racism, and
other forms of discrimination against Africans, are designed to maintain
African Americans in relative and absolute poverty. Poverty represents the
deliberate, vicious robbery, exploitation, and extortion of the labor, wealth
and resources of the African community by the European/White American
community. Thus, if crime is caused by poverty, then Black criminality is
crime White criminality produced. If African American crime is the
psychologically-morally mediated outcome of poverty, or more specifically, the
outcome of the psychological-moral factors within the individual, then it
still remains the crime that European/White American crime produced.
Psychological-moral values are learned social-political products. People are
taught to be moral by direct instruction, observational learning,
personal-familial-community-peer group relations and experience, and prevailing
overall politico economic conditions. All these factors are under the
dominative and self-serving influence of the European/White American community.

Thus, intimating that African American criminality is the result of moral
depravity the European/White American community unwittingly incriminates itself
and reveals its own criminality. To avoid acknowledgment and confrontation with
the fact that the moral attitudes and values are learned by the means just
mentioned, and the means are under their control, the White American community
must allege that the moral depravity of African Americans is genetic in
nature: that it is inherited within their genes. Thus, it absolves itself of
all responsibility. It is this type of absolution that sets up a vicious
criminal mill wherein the European/White American community produces the
criminality it attributes to innate African American venality. This is the most
devastating of European/White American self-fulfilling prophecies.

WEALTH AND CRIME:

Wealth, the feelings and the associated ideas it evokes in some individuals,
may motivate criminal behavior. Crime is not the monopoly of poor folks, nor is
greed, alienation, and so on. We should note that a person or group is seldom
if ever exposed to one environment exclusively, particularly in the United
States. Poverty-stricken people know of and
have been exposed to wealth. They are often keenly aware of the material and
social benefits derived from being wealthy. This knowledge and experience,
along with the internalization of cultural myths concerning rights and
opportunities to acquire wealth, in conjunction with other ideas and feelings,
interact with the current situation to determine behaviors, some of which may
be labeled criminal. Discrepancies such as between what is and what could be,
what is and how it got to be the way it is, are contradictions which may
motivate criminal behavior as a symptomatic compromise. It may be more the
exposure to wealth, to the wealthy via direct and indirect experience (e.g.,
reading, advertisement, etc.), which is the source of criminal behavior, more
so than the exposure to poverty. Perspective, values, socio-ecological context,
personal characteristics, and any other number of other transducers may evoke
criminal behavior.

In fact, violence of all types including robbery, thievery, extortion, murder,
are the monopoly of the middle- and ruling- classes. Their apparent non-criminality
is mainly due to the fact that they define what crime is, and defines out of
existence their own crimes. Their criminal activities are delegated through
their police forces (enforcers), armed forces (gangs), bankers (loan sharks),
sales persons and advertising agents (con artists), business men (extortionists
making offers others cannot refuse), diplomats (front men), corporations
(rackets), consortiums (drug and other types of rings), and numerous other
euphemistically named organizations whose nefarious activities are whitewashed
by deceptive terms and legitimized by their power. Their taking of property,
wealth, dignity, and lives of others by force is called war; their major
massacres, called World War I and World War II, the winning of which were
sources of immense feelings of joy, pride, narcissistic self-congratulation,
increased power, prestige, and wealth for the victors. Through delegation,
distancing, and subtle use of the word, the middle- and ruling-classes deceive
themselves and others into thinking of them as beautiful people.

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our
countrys most agile military force  the Marine Corps. I served in all
commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that
period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business,
for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for
capitalism....

Thus I helped make Mexico
and especially Tampico safe for
American oil interests in 1914. I helped make HaitiCuba a
decent place for National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.... I helped
purify Nicaragua
for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought
light to the Dominican Republic
for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China
in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell
racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I
feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to
operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three
continents. Major General Smedley D. Butler

WHITE CONTROL OF BLACK TRANSDUCTION:

Transduction refers to the process wherein one form of or information is
converted or transformed by some type of mediation system into another form.
Hence, through some brain or neuronal mediation processes, ideas, perceptions,
feeling environmental information, .. .may be transformed into behavioral acts
or a variety of other products and processes. Transduction via mind-set
attitudes, expectations, desires, etc., transforms environmental information
into other forms of thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., which are then utilized
by the mind to originate and regulate behavior.

Persons who possess operatively different sets of values, desires, attitudes,
abilities, resources, goals, self-perceptions, etc., who find themselves in the
same objective environment (physically speaking) will experience that
environment different ly, and behave differently in response to it.
Consequently, a number of behavioral outcomes may flow from two persons
reacting to the same environment  they may experientially and behaviorally
respond in the same way, or in different ways. Two objectively different
environmental circumstances may produce the same experiential behavioral
response in two persons due to the different orientations brought to them by
those persons. Thus, greed may be evoked by wealth in some individuals while
poverty evokes greed in others.

To a significant extent, sociopolitical power held by one person or a group of
persons, permits that person or group to manipulate the valuational/perceptual
attitudes of another less powerful person or group, and thereby manipulate
their transductive experiences, and through these their behavioral output.
White America by naming, defining, interpreting and abstracting the world, by
associating various aspects of it with pleasure or pain, seeks to control and
name the experience of Black America and thereby name and control its reactive
and proactive behavior.

Because this White American conspiracy which more often than not operates
on a subliminal level is consciously perceived by the Black individual as his
own transductive attitudes, feelings, perceptions, etc., they appear to him to
be logically, naturally, universally, divinely, and therefore
unquestionably real and true. He thinks that he alone is the determiner of his
attitudinal/behavioral tendencies. Until African Americans develop their own
transducing or transforming values and identity (which is a system of values,
precepts, etc.,) based on a thorough objective analysis of their historical,
immediate, and anticipatory reality, they will be the unwitting pawns of
European/White American self-serving needs and desires.

Neither Poverty nor Wealth alone makes a man criminally avaricious, In both
cases his thievery is motivated by his desire to own more than he already
possesses, And by his willingness to break the laws in order to attain his
hearts desires, The type of crime a man tends to commit is more a reflection
of his social status
values and opportunity. Than it is a measure of his presumed Venality Accountants
embezzle
Why mug someone when you can more easily and profitably cook the books?
The Lower classes rob Houses
The Ruling classes rob Nations
In the area of Drug Rehabilitation it should be the Pusher who is
the object of Detoxification
For it is his Addiction that is
the true cause of addiction in others  His Addiction to the American Dream

SUICIDE:

Since suicide is a social phenomenon by virtue of its essential element, it is
proper to discuss the place it occupies among other social phenomena. EMILE
DURKHEIM Suicide: A Study In Sociology

On superficial thought, one of the outstanding characteristics of the suicidal
act is that it is illogical. Yet one can take the position that there is an
implicit syllogism or argument in the suicidal act. Although we cannot be sure
that our logical reconstructions of suicidal logic are correct, it remains that
the suicidal person behaves as if he had reasoned and had come to certain 
albeit, generally unacceptable  conclusions. E SHNEIDMAN et al, The Psychology
Of Suicide

SUICIDE IS THE PRE-EMINENT EXPRESSION of Black-on-Black
violence. It is the other side of Black-on-Black homicide. Both homicide and
suicide are different forms of the collective self-destruction of a race by
death. Both actualize a death-wish instigated externally, and executed
internally. Both are assassinations by proxy: victim murdering victim. Both
involve the killing of someone considered expendable, someone lodged between
the assailant and some form of settlement or satisfaction. As in murder, in
suicide there is the killer and the victim, the executioner and the executed,
the judge and the condemned.

Suicide, like homicide, is dyadic. It is therefore a social act. It is the
deadly vectorial outcome of a cataclysmic convergence of socially interactive
forces. As in murder, in suicide killing is always done in public, in the
presence of another, whether that other is physically or mentally present and
accounted for. There is always the final judgment without appeal. Someones
hopes have been unrealized, someones vanity injured, someones been mistreated
and demands that the ultimate price be paid. Someone must be sacrificed to the
needs of another, whether that other be inside or outside the skin of the
victim. Both the homicide and the suicide are victims of ideas, sacrifices made
to some ideology, some system of values. Both are attempts to palliate some
unbearable hurt or pain, some sickness of the soul.

THE BLACK FAMILY, THE BLACK MALE, AND SUICIDE:

The Eurocentric organization of American society is such that its stability
depends on the dysfunctionality and near disorganization of the Black family.
Infected with the germ of self-alienation, self-abnegation,
self-misrepresentation, and economic deprivation, the resultant intra-familial
conflict often is actualized as various forms of suicide by its young. African
Americans are the most patriotic of all American ethnic groups they sacrifice
their lives every day for their country. The frequent breaking up of the
African American home by many-pronged attacks on it by the racist system in
which it is embedded, frequently leaves its children without a warm, caring,
protective and wise parental system with which to identify and with which they
can overcome an encroaching sense of emotional and social isolation: a system
which can be their ally in their embattled struggle against a hostile world.

For the male child the loss of his fathers love and protection, or his failure
to find a worthy substitute as the result of White supremacys unrelenting and
murderous assault on Black manhood, are most often the apparent stimuli which
instigate his committing suicide. The chronic and over determined negation of
African American males, if not countered by strong Black male egos, may subject
them to fits of depression and dejection. These mood disorders very frequently
precipitate suicidal behavior, either directly and swiftly by lethal weapons,
substances, and mechanical contrivances, or indirectly and slowly by injurious
addictive habits, politically-based stress, negative health practices, neglect,
and reckless behavior.

The rites of passage through racist White American-dominated society is
extremely stressful for Black youth. This is more so the case for the Black
male since he receives the brunt of the White supremacist attack against Black
America. Stripped of appropriate male support, guidance, protection, education,
and other important coping skills by a White racist system which fears his
Afrocentric competence, he is left vulnerable to the thousands of little nicks
and burns, physical and psychological insults, which cumulatively push him
toward self-annihilation.

Not allowed the privileges and status of full and unfettered manhood by White
racist male domination, a significant number of African American males are
immaturized or are often led to express their manhood in self-destructive
ways: in ways harmful to other Black males and the Black community in general.
Immaturized by White racist oppression, void of overarching and long-term Afrocentric
goals which provide them with maximum and healthy control over their impulses
(including impulses to kill themselves) they may commit suicide. Without
Afrocentric self-definition, possessed by an introjected alien identity, and
racked by neurotic and psychotic conflict, the Black male readily becomes
subject to White racist psycho political, psychopathological promptings and
persecutions. Consequently, he may come to think that the only effective
solution to his problems lie in physical or mental self-abnegation.

To be an African American male in White America is to live with anger and
hostility, to feel the need to attack, to violently retaliate, to even the
score. These murderous feelings without appropriate catharsis, sublimation,
channeling, or targets. ..yet in need of outward expression.. .are often turned
inward resulting in self-annihilation. White racist American society, harboring
a poorly concealed death-wish against its Black captives, generally leaves but
a few outlets for the release of societally provoked Black male rage: all
inappropriate! They include the abject submission to oppression, narcosis by
drugs or religion, deliberate ignorance, unending, unrewarding protests, futile
sub rosa grumbling, over compensatory status striving, criminality, and
homicidal attacks on other Black males or on himself (suicide). Having
internalized white racist values and attitudes, having been possessed by his
introjected white racist demon, the suicidal African American blames his
victimized self. Identified with his implanted alien spirit, he harbors a
death- wish against the victims of White racist oppression amongst whom he
himself is numbered. Looking at the world through jaundiced white racist eyes,
he sees the enemy: And the enemy is himself.

SUICIDE MORTALITY OF BLACK MALES:

The suicide mortality rate reaches its peak in African American males between
ages twenty-five to thirty-four and in White males at age sixty-five and over.
Homicide and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young Black
males between ages 15 and 24. They are probably the leading causes
ifaccidental deaths, and the many suicides on the installment plan 
addictions, poor health habits, etc.  are included. Thus, Black men kill
themselves with their futures ahead of them, and White men when their futures
are behind them. One dies ablossoming in the Spring, the other after the first
frosts of Autumn.

Apparently, the young African American suicide is one who has grown old while
very young. He has packed all the guilt, failure, shame, fatalism, pain,
hopelessness, and cynicism of a lifetime within a life-span of three decades.
Somehow the cavalier optimism of youth and the willful self-confidence of young
manhood are dissipated at or before the point of actualization and assumption
of their powers to transform the world. Somehow Black youth and young adults
are born into and come early to exist in a different and ominous reality: one
that was created for them; one under the control of others. That created
reality negates, diminishes and saps their will to live, makes their lives
pointless, an absurdity filled with bitter ironies, a happenstance, a quicksand
wherein every effort at self-rescue seems to pull them more rapidly under, and
where every branch thrown to a sinking man breaks as he struggles to reach safe
ground.

That created reality is the handiwork of the introjected white
supremacist spirit by which the African American is possessed, with which he
identifies, and with whose eyes he peers out and surveys an alien and wasted
landscape which promises him no surcease and which tantalizes him with
ever-receding beauteous mirages. It is that internalized Eurocentric spirit
which he misidentifies as his mind and thoughts, his superego and conscience:
It is those internalized racist stereotypes speaking inside his head which
drive him to murder, to die, to want to be murdered in order quieten their
cacophonous chorus. It is that internalized racist spirit unopposed by hope of
African triumph, love of African self, self-determined competence and
self-confidence and faith, which, taking possession of his body and mind, uses
his own hands to take his own life.

Black-on-Black suicide is the tail face of a coin on which Black-on-Black
homicide is the head face. Both are welded together by violence. Both represent
violent attempts to triumph over hopelessness and despair. Both represent
abject reactionary surrender to what is perceived as an immutable, oppressive
ordering of the universe. While the Black-on-Black homicidal criminal seeks to
triumph through the externalization of murderous aggression, the Black-on-Black
suicide victim seeks to triumph through his internalization of murderous
aggression. Both seek to violently cheat destiny as they have been made to see it.
Their pain blinds them to other alternatives, obscures obvious, though
perilous, pathways through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Free to choose
only the wrong things they both choose to murder the wrong persons for the
wrong reasons.

SUICIDE AS
DISPLACED AGGRESSION:

Suicide is a form of displaced aggression. To internalize the white racist
spirit is to internalize the White supremacists death-wish directed at the
African male. When a young Black male commits suicide it is usually a sign that
the implanted White racist incubus has executed the order of its archetypal
racist masters. It is the introjected white racist superego in black face which
mercilessly chastises him for having sinned, and fallen short of the glory of
God (European man). It is this implanted Eurocentric conscience which
threatens him with eternal damnation for having committed the original sin of
being born African in America, which derides him for his alleged helplessness,
and unworthiness:

This same Eurocentric conscience tells him he will never be any good, never
succeed on his own terms or otherwise, that he deserves punishment, that he is
deservedly the object of hatred and revilement, that he has been cursed by God
and sentenced to unending servitude, and that his death would be a favor to the
world; tells him that he is unlovable, unprotected, incapable of happiness,
unemployable, and that his only enemies are himself and the blackness of his
skin. Having internalized the accusative self-serving conscience of his oppressors,
the African American suicide victim exaggerates his self-accusation, the
hopelessness of his future, his incapability for redemptive transformation. He
considers his situation incorrigible.

His internalized alien spirit screams its recriminations and he masochistically
submits to severe feelings of guilt and self-devaluation. It is this spirit
which splits his psyche into executor and executed; into the person and
depersonalized, judge and condemned. Thus, when he kills he does not kill
himself; he kills the nigger within. Through apparent Black-on-Black suicide
the white supremacist establishment obscurely pushes one more African toward
the Final Solution it plans for all Africans.

The Black victim may think that suicide represents a sort of grim triumph, a
having of the last word, the last laugh on his tormentors; that his suicide
represents the ultimate protest, the penultimate defiance of the will of his
enemies. Suicide may be his way of refusing to live a life of quiet
desperation, of masochistic screaming, and squealing supplication, while
fulfilling the sadistic needs of others. Maybe, like his ancestors who
voluntariiy gave up the ghost during the Middle Passage by jumping overboard to
feed the sharks, he sees living the life of a slave as not living life at all.
And yet, he must know, or he quickly must be told, that such a triumph, such a
hollow victory is pyrrhic, more costly to the victor than the vanquished;
that it is an illusion of overcomance. How much more heroic to die fighting ones
true enemies than to die fighting false ones; to live five minutes as a man
than die forever a coward! For the fight is not against the shadows cast on the
walls of ones mind but with the caster of shadows, the Wicked Witch of The
West.

For God gave us not a spirit of cowardice, but that of power and of love and
of soundness of mind. The power of European man over others is the power of
deceit, illusion, lies and hatred over honesty, reality, truth and love. Such
power cannot last.

COSMIC CAUSATION:

An act has a past and a future; it is not contained within the skin of its time
of occurrence
Like a rock thrown into a placid lake, its effects flow beyond its point of
impact and ripple across
the surface of time and place unsettling things both near and far removed
An act is concerted; it flows from generation to generation into generations
yet unborn
Its explosion creates a universe ever expanding; its momentum radiating
concentrically throughout
infinity until counteracted by nullifying counterforces
An individual act of sin is always communal It is always paid for  sometimes
by the sinner,
always by others; others  good and bad, righteous and unrighteous
For ultimately, an act of sin is impersonal
 it rains on the just as well as on the unjust
The sins of the fathers are visited unto the fourth generation
The children must pay for the sins of their fathers for such sins are their
inheritance
For they were fathered by sin
And in accepting the bequeathed bounty of their sinful fathers, they at one and
the same time
accept the curses of that inheritance For with the goods of sin comes evil
corrupting and destroying those who would be good
For he is not truly good and innocent who eats of food poisoned by sin, even if
he eats them in
ignorance of their deadly nature
For the wages of sin is death
For children of evil fathers must atone the sins of their fathers if they and
their children and
their childrens children are to escape the wrathful judgment which surely must
come
The sin of one is the sin of all, of the dead, of the living, and of the yet to
be conceived.

GOODNESS AND DECENCY under oppressive regimes are merely two versions of the
same attitude  submissiveness. Law-abiding goodness and decency within the
context of White American! European socioeconomic domination involves the
unresisting acceptance and self-abasing obeisance to Eurocentric values,
attitudes, rules, and regulations by African Americans even when they are
manifestly biased against Afrocentric interests. These forms of submissiveness
ultimately involve the humble compliance with Eurocentric demands by the
African American community even when such demands are exploitative, unjust,
injurious, and in many instances, lethal. Eurocentrically-defined goodness and
decency require that African Americans submit to White American/European
domination without complaint, or that their complaints be processed through
White American/Euro pean-defined legal channels, processed and redressed
within the system. In the name of law and order and racial harmony
eurocentrically-defined goodness and decency call for the African American
community to repress or compliantly restrict its just demands, to renounce or
greatly attenuate their active, self- determined pursuit and fulfillment.

Furthermore, they require the African American community silence its
justified and valid criticisms of those who oppress and exploit it; that it
defenselessly permit others to abuse it and yet to be ever ready to be
indiscriminately benevolent to others, including its enemies.

White American/European-defined good and decent attitudes and behavior as
internalized and practiced by African Americans are essentially
quasi-religious, quasi-legalistic rationalizations and protections against
anxiety, against the xaggerated fear of White American/European power; Black
American/African forms of avoiding the arousal of White American/European
resentment of and retaliation against African American self-determination. They
also represent ways of securing reassurance by garnering European paternalistic
affection. The internalization and expression of these attitudes and behaviors
on the part of African Americans require they feel unworthy and incapable of
goodness and decency unless defined, imposed on them, and enforced by White
AmericanlEuropean agencies. Therefore, European/White American-defined and
regulated moral/behavioral concepts are imposed against the will of the African
American community without its consent and are therefore accepted by that
community with a spirit of unconscious resentment, hostility, and
self-loathing.

These unrecognized and unacknowledged feelings then find indirect expression
through projected and displaced aggressive behavior towards others  their
neighbors. These feelings also find indirect expression through guilt-driven,
self-destructive habits and mutually destructive social relations.
In general, the conscience implanted in the collective African American psyche
is the moral/ethical agent of European/American domination and functions to
maintain that domination under the guise of mediating morally acceptable
thought and behavior.

It is this implanted White American/European conscience introjected in service
to White American/European domination that is rejected by the Black-on-Black
criminal. It is this moral/ethical double-agent, this source of self-defeating
goodness and decency exhibited by oppressed African Americans, which is
eschewed out-of-hand by the Black-on-Black criminal. It is this externally
imposed and tricky good and decent conscience which he so resentfully and
spitefully ridicules, seeks to undermine, and finally defeats. He subliminally
recognizes the sanctimonious deceit and dumb hypocrisy of those African
Americans who submit to its tyrannical and exploitative demands in the name of
morality, ethics, law-abidingness and brotherly love. He perceives the
expediency, fear and cowardice, the weakness and absence of self-ordained
authority which lurk behind their good and decent facades. This deception
emboldens him to violate their rights and bodies, to violently assault their
innocence, to viciously pillage and plunder their properties.

This violent criminal orientation can only be sufficiently attenuated if and
when the United States of America becomes a fully-liberal and egalitarian
society for all, or if and when African Americans and Africans the world-over
critically reject White American/European self-serving definitions of Good and
Evil and replace these with Afrocentric/humanistic definitions and behavioral
orientations.

WHITE EUROPEAN DISPENSATION:

Often those who make laws, who discern the laws of Nature, come to think
themselves as above those laws. The White American, the foremost definer,
inscriber, and enforcer of laws and codes, the foremost discoverer of Natures
arcane functional infrastructure, is also their most frequent and flagrant
violator, and most disingenuous subverter. And yet he feels that he should pay
no penalties for their violation and subversion. Hence, his sponsorship of the most
massive criminality, terror, and ecological disaster which afflicts the world
today.

The White American promulgates the European regressive ethical ideology of
individual sin; the ideological belief that a sinful act merely reflects the
dysfunctionality of the person who perpetrated the act and that penalties
attached to their perpetration are only to be borne by the perpetrator. This
mystification permits him to deny the cosmic consequences of his own criminal
behavior and to deny that he and his children must pay for violating a rule
central to his ethical code  Do unto others as you would have others do unto
you  the Golden Rule. Thinking himself above the law, denying its
applicability to himself particularly in regard to its violation when interacting
with African peoples, he assumes he may with impunity enslave, murder, rape,
rob, terrorize, defraud, deceive, brutalize and do all manner of
psychophysically injurious things to African peoples and escape the negative
consequences of his acts.

Thus he pretends undeserved and pained surprise when his dignity is insulted,
his goods are stolen, his peace disturbed, his innocent women and children
violated, his sons assaulted, mugged and murdered, his property destroyed and
devalued, and his resources wasted by some of Africas
sons. When he is cursed and reviled by those, and the children of those who he
has historically and contemporaneously so heartlessly abused, he is similarly
pained and surprised. He thinks that his pillage of the resources, minds,
bodies, and souls of African peoples gives him the right to sleep undisturbed,
to walk the highways and byways of this earth unmolested; gives him the right
to have his stolen goods be left unmolested. Yet deep in his heart he must know
that the crimes committed against him and his children are the result of the
original crimes of his fathers  his fathers, the enslavers and exploiters of
the world. He must know, too, that though his fathers may have lived and died
happily surrounded by their mournful slaves, that he, his children, and the
children of slaves are doomed to live in enmity.

Every mugging, each murder, insult, every disturbance of his peace of
mind, every desecration of his property perpetrated by Black against White,
every beggarly black hand thrust out by penurious Black mendicants call for
reparations he must make until he chooses to retire the debts of his fathers.
And he will continue to pay, as will his children, though they lifted not a
whip to strike the back of a supplicating slave. For in his and their
innocence they have not only accepted the bloody wealth and prerogatives of
their fathers, but have waxed fat on their increase, and more ominously, have
accepted and further cultivated the attitudes of superiority and supremacy
bequeathed to them with their fathers estates. Thus, good and decent White
folk must suffer with the rest.

Why must these good and decent ones suffer? Because their goodness and
decency are but illusions created by a repressive denial of the truth. Their
innocence and goodness are the innocence and goodness purchased with stolen
goods, and the blood, sweat and tears of others they fleeced of their humanity.
They are allegedly good, decent and law-abiding only because through their
deceptive writing and reading of history they have forgotten the murders they
committed to obtain the wealth and privileges which now subsidize their good
life. How good and decent would White America really be without support of its
blood-money and legitimized theft of bread from the mouths of others?

THE UNCIVIL CIVILIZED WHITEMAN:

The White American dares to think himself civilized. His legitimate theft of
the wealth and the resources of others now exempts him from the need to
commit crimes in the street; to look the people he robs and kills directly in
their eyes as did his pioneering and colonizing fathers. With one stroke of
the pen, he mugs millions and desecrates the whole of the earth. Because it is
a pen he wields, and mercenary bandits he hires (including his own armed
forces) to do his dirty deeds for him and not a pistol held to the temple, a
knife or a deadly grip across the throat of his victim as the Black-on-Black
mugger must do he deludes himself by thinking himself good, decent, and law-abiding.

You have murdered millions of persons; plundered, pillaged and ravaged
thousands of hamlets, villages, towns, cities, states and nations. Now you seek
to legitimize your criminality and perceive yourself as good and law-abiding.
Your civility and civilization are like the rest of your lives, purchased
through the death of others. It is easy to be law-abiding and decent when
you write the law and define decency and when you have the money to buy them. A
true test of your ethicality would be to be good and law-abiding in the face of
deliberately instigated poverty, degradation, powerlessness, hopelessness,
insecurity, terror, pain and death. Until you have lived under such
circumstances do you really know how decent, law-abiding and good you
really are?

Yours is a goodness born of evil. Your goodness does the work of Evil its
father. It is Evil disguised as good, hatred disguised as love. That is why
your charity corrupts. Your goodness is the goodness born of not having to
murder another in order to take his possessions but of having your police, your
armies, mercenaries and puppet dictators do it for you. In the name of
national interests, self-defense, free enterprise, private property,
fighting for democracy, restoring peace, maintaining the balance of
power, and hundreds of other hypnotic, self-deceptive words and phrases, you
hide from yourselves the murder committed by your patriotic sons. With
diplomatic double-talk you deny that your armadas  standing and mercenary
armies  your fortresses scattered hither and yond, your deadly missiles and
star wars battle stations are but guns you hold to the collective temples of
the worlds peoples while you rob them hand-over-fist.

Your newspapers and books, your media, are your instruments of repression,
repressing through misrepresentation, omissions and lies the painful reality of
your truly murderous trek across the globe  permitting you to think yourself
inherently good and your victims inherently evil. They reverse reality,
stridently screaming in their headlines about the murder of one innocent
White victim on the streets by some burley Black man, some Black teen-age
savages gone wilding, while the rape, murder and plunder of a whole African
continent and its peoples does not merit a whisper in the last page, last
column. Of this your goodness is born. And for this reason your goodness
shall be assaulted, your peace disturbed, and you shall see evil intent staring
back at you through every non-White pair of eyes. That Black man you hate and
fear is the Black man you made. You are being menaced by your own shadow.

Yet there remains a question which begs an answer! While some Whites suffer the
criminal depredations of Black criminals, it is Blacks who suffer far more than
do Whites, from the activities Black-on-Black criminals. Why do good and
decent Black people suffer the malice of Black criminal violence? Victims of
other peoples cruelties, whether they themselves are good and decent, or evil
or indecent, are not exempt from suffering for the sins of their fathers. For
if fathers sell their children into bondage the children will suffer from their
fathers mercenary betrayal.

While many African ancestral fathers fought to keep their children free from
enslavement, others betrayed and sold them to the White enslavers. For this
betrayal, perhaps some would call it a necessary compromise, Africas
children had to pay. Slavery, colonialism, onerous subordination and general
contempt, powerlessness and dependency, hunger and starvation, are but some of
the crosses they have to bear for the sins of their fathers and their enslavers.

Too many of ancestral Africas fathers and sons  forgetting the commonality of
their Africanicity, differences in tribe and tradition notwithstanding  were
corrupted by those who were to become their masters. They then turned on each
other, and on their children, and their children turned on them. And turning
around on themselves they bartered their progeny and the soul of the race for a
mess of European porridge.

If the children of African American elders attack them, it is in part because
their elders have betrayed them, because they have sold their childrens
birthright and squandered their inheritance. Black America is attacked by its
children because, like too many of its slave-trading ancestral fathers, it has
refused to fully recognize its fundamental Africanicity and have its
constituents relate to each other and the world according to that identity. Too
many African Americans have permitted the luster of gold and silver, the
glitter and glamour of trinkets, status symbols and personal vanities, small
comforts, false alienating ideologies and religions, the addictive pursuit of
painkillers and pacifiers, the belief that Whites are invincible, to blind
them to the truth and reality of what they are doing to their children.

African American mothers and fathers betray their children when in seeking to
escape the anguish of their oppression, they vainly court the sympathy and love
of their White American and alien exploiters. They betray their children when
they, in their poverty of spirit, spend all their monies and resources to
purchase their self-respect and the overpriced, shoddy goods from those who
hold them in utter contempt. They delude their children when they pander to the
interests of other races which are inimical to their own; and when they enrich,
through trade and commerce, their oppressors children while impoverishing
their own. African mothers and fathers betray their children when they permit
their oppressors to mis-educate their children.

When African American fathers choose not to prepare their sons to undertake the
revolutionary overthrow of their oppressors they betray their children and the
race. They thereby earn the enmity of their sons and come to live in fear of
them. They see them as the enemy. As long as African American mothers and
fathers refuse to take primary responsibility for the care and welfare of their
children and families; refuse to become their childrens preeminent educators
and enculturators; refuse to take control of their economy and bequeath their
wealth to their offspring; refuse to take charge of their history and their
future; refuse to accept the positive reality of their African identity and to
love their African selves, they shall continue to be vindictive targets of
their childrens violence. And their children shall continue to be exploited
and victimized by the children of alien races. And they shall continue to be
victimized by indomitable addictions to euphoric substances and faddish
vanities the satisfaction of which will drive them to violently victimize their
brothers and sisters.
Hence, if African Americans are to be truly liberated, they must vindicate
their fathers debts by their absolute refusal to follow their fathers
erroneous ways and by dauntlessly undertaking to complete the arduous
revolutionary task which, for too long, they have ignored. By these means they
will forgive those ancestors who betrayed them; they will honor themselves and
pay homage to those ancestors who kept the faith, fought and died that they
might be free.

The race is born again in its children. Those who live today are the
reincarnated ancestral spirits of those who lived yesterday. They themselves
are to be the reincarnated spirits of those who will live tomorrow. Yet those
who live today are more than just a link in the karmic chain which binds the
generations. For by their knowledge of truth and of self, and by their courage
to live true to that knowledge, they can positively transfigure their own
lives, the lives of their ancestors and the lives of their progeny. Then the
cycle shall be broken, the race shall be free. And once again its life shall be
an example and blessing to mankind.
For every generation represents a new opportunity for a race to purify its past
and to beatify its future.

The Neutralization Of Black On Black Violence

Is the contention exaggerated, or does it speak the simple truth, that man has
contrived his institutions for the combat of crime so that he may in fact
maintain it?  PAUL REIWALD Society And Its Criminals

THE FOREGOING DISCUSSIONS briefly outlined some of the forces which move some
African Americans toward criminality and Black-on-Black violence. The
decriminalization of the Black male and the neutralization of Black-on-Black
violence require that we learn to discern the forces which compel Black
criminal behavior and Black-on-Black violence; that we gain an expert knowledge
of their psycho political, psychodynamic interaction and of their
politico-economical, socioeconomic functionality. Decriminalization and
neutralization further require that African Americans develop, control, and
effectively utilize opposing countervailing forces against those prevailing
forces which, if permitted to continue, will extinguish African life at home
and abroad.
The prevention of Black-on-Black violence and Black criminality, which results
in the incarceration of tens of thousands of young African American males in
the prime of their manhood, depends on the creation and vigorous activation of
Afrocentric countervailing forces opposed to those Eurocentric forces which
motivate and energize their criminal assault on the African American community
and their self-destructive assault on themselves. These men, were their minds
and bodies free, would be the leaders of the revolutionary vanguard which would
overthrow and obliterate the truly criminal dominance of the European.

Afrocentric countervailing forces include: Afrocentric personal, moral, ethical
values and appetitive incentives; Afrocentric cultural values, interpersonal
and social interactive orientations; Afrocentric cultural motives, goals, and
community organization; and Afrocentric policing, criminal justice, governance
policies, and the establishment of Afrocentric economical, political,
technological, cultural and military systems. The scope of this essay does not
permit a discussion of the nature and purposes of each of these countervailing
forces. They will be discussed in detail in forthcoming works. However, as
implied by our previous analyses, the construction and effective utilization of
Afrocentric countervailing forces necessary for African survival and the
empowerment and enhancement of the quality of African life, require our
technical understanding of a number of important facts:

1. The continuing economical, cultural, and perhaps biological survival of
African Americans and Africans the world- over, is in serious question.
Black-on-Black violence and criminality are just two of the most salient
symptoms of a people headed for self-destruction and possible annihilation. A
drastic reorganization of priorities and re-examination of values: development
of Afrocentric cultural, political, economic programs; and Afrocentric ethical
renewal, must be undertaken if disaster is to be avoided and our survival
secured. This requires a thorough understanding of the oppressive,
imperialistic functioning of the ideology of Eurocentric individualism when it
is unwittingly and unmodified accepted and practiced by subordinated African
peoples. Africans must recognize that individuality is a collective
epiphenomenon that radiates from group power and prestige. There are no
individuals who belong to powerless, degraded groups: only notorious
stereotypical exceptions to a very general racist rule. Individual choice and
distinction is a fringe benefit of those who belong to dominant or autonomous
groups. The route to individual power is that of group empowerment. All other
individual power is illusionary and ultimately a form of self- and
other-destruction.

2. It is of premier importance that African Americans understand the criminal,
anti-life origins of White American society; understand its current national
and international criminal and crimogenic nature; and how their imitation of
that society  their wish to be integrated into its mainstream, their wish to
be totally identified with it; as well as their wrongheaded anger, frustration
and self-alienation which result from being rejected by it; are the essential
sources of Black-on-Black violence, criminality, sociopolitical and economical
impotence, mental maladjustment, and racial death on the installment plan. To
become one with a system which was built on African enslavement and is
currently founded on the continuing socioeconomic, sociopolitical degradation,
ignorance and disorganization of African peoples, is to become allied with the
deadly criminal enemies of African peoples.

The psychodynamics of ego self-defense mechanisms, internalization of racist
attitudes and perceptions, identification with the aggressor, displaced
aggression, misdirected anger, rage, etc., and how they are utilized by a
crimogenic Eurocentric system in its attempt to compel African Americans to
engage in apparently self-willed acts of communal, interpersonal and
individual acts of self-destruction, must be thoroughly understood. Discussions
of how these mechanisms operate within the context of group power differentials
must be numerous and in- depth, and the methods of counteracting their negative
effects taught and trained as a part of African American education for life,
survival and overcomance. The African American must come to understand that
ego self-defense, under the ineffectively opposed influence of an oppressive
white racist regime, is no true defense of the ego or of the self. It is
ultimately naught but a defense and rationalization of the right to be
destructively exploited by his Eurocentric oppressors, and to join them in
their annihilation of his African self.

Displaced aggression, which is the source of so much Black-on-Black violence,
suicide and self-destructive addictive habits as well as Black educational,
political, cultural and economical under-achievement, will virtually cease if
African males, instead of cowering before the illusion of Eurocentric power and
invincibility, would decide to stand up and make their preoccupying goal the
eradication of European power and domination. They would stop killing
themselves if they decide to neutralize their true frustrators, tormentors and
enemies.

3. It must be understood that it is the unexamined acceptance of the racist
White American value system and the egregious imitation of White American
material greed by African Americans (and Africans worldwide) which are the
primary sources of Black violence, general community disorganization, relative
powerlessness and poverty. Under European domination and organization of the
national and international economic systems and opportunity structures,
disproportionate numbers of Africans are virtually forced to engage in the same
criminal acts of violence against and oppression of African peoples as do the
Europeans whose values they try so vainly to realize. In practice, the
Eurocentric value system has underdeveloped African economies and impoverished
African peoples, endangered the whole of life on earth, bred, aided and abetted
the rape, robbery and murder of nations and peoples.

Therefore the wholesale acceptance of Eurocentric values by African peoples
will but hasten a destructive process that is already tidal in its immensity. A
impartial examination of African values and their practical application in
African life is the only means of achieving African liberation, and
significantly reducing Black violence and disintegration of the African
American community. What fruits for African Americans have the tree of White
American values borne?

The African American must accept the very likely possibility that he may never
be fully integrated as an equal into the so-called American mainstream. Even if
he were fully accepted there is no guarantee that should circumstances warrant
it, the Eurocentric system will not renege on its prior acceptance and eject
him from the mainstream. As long as Whites possess the power of acceptance or
non-acceptance, the power of the purse, police, military, etc., the existence
of African peoples is in jeopardy: whether integrated or segregated. African
survival depends on meeting White power with equal or superior Black power.

This requires the construction of an African American nation within a nation
with a fully developed sociopolitical, socioeconomic system, fully invested in
the ownership of the American production system to the point of, obtaining an
influential equity in it, and the conversion of that system from an instrument
of African exploitation and death to one of African enhancement and life.
Alliances between African Americans and other African nations must be forged
all over the globe, and those alliances must be organized to retake control over
their economic and cultural systems; the development, on the African continent
and other places, of technological and scientific systems second-to-none;
development of military defense systems capable of effectively defending
Africans against European military incursions.

4. The principal economic roles of African Americans in White America include
those of being surplus, expendable, cheap labor and heedless consumers. These
roles somewhat parallel those of Africans internationally as harvesters of basic
raw materials, and as consumers of the surplus production of other nations, not
as producers of finished products for their own or the consumption of others.
Collectively, if the African American population were considered a nation, it
would rank as the ninth or tenth richest on earth considering its national
income and wealth. It would be considered one of the largest African nations in
the world and with its educated and trained classes, its relatively politically
sophisticated population would represent a considerable challenge to the top
ranking nations on the earth today. It has developed a significant and growing
coterie of administrators, bureaucrats, government officials, elected
officials, civil servants, business executives, professionals, intellectuals,
generals, etc., which are the foundations and sinews of a modern nation and
which could represent the basis for African people to take care of and
determine their own interests.

Yet the perception of Black America is one of poverty material poverty and
poverty of spirit. This perception which runs against the grain of African
American economic reality and potential, is necessary in order to facilitate
and rationalize the riotous fleecing of Black consumers and the rape of Black
human and economic resources by White Americans and other ethnic groups. This
rapacious exploitation of Africans requires that the Black population must
starve its own members, particularly its youth, in order to support the
families and youth of other ethnic groups. To meet its own economic and
institutional needs, the African American population needs to spend the largest
bulk of its consumer dollars with itself and engage in the production of
economic goods and services which can be sold to itself and others.

The African community must enter into full economic competition with
other peoples. It cannot do this and continue to be the economic sucker of
other peoples. Black Americans, with their very sizeable population, 12% - 15%
of the general American population, and relatively large consumer wealth,
spends only about five cents of each of its consumer dollars with themselves,
and ninety-five cents with others. They invest relatively little of their
earnings on wealth creating instruments, activities, economic organizations,
and real estate. Thus, the African American community spends itself into
poverty and though it possesses the capacity for tremendous economic growth and
influence it does not significantly use that capacity to create employment,
purpose, wealth and stability for its constituents, particularly its male
members.

The organization (more aptly, disorganization) of the African American economy
and the psycho economic organization of the African American personality denies
its children an economic inheritance, legacy, and tradition. Hence they become reactionary
dependent on the economic machinations of their oppressors and exploiters. The
failure of the African American leadership and professional classes, petty
bourgeois and business classes to appropriately organize a coherent and
cohesive Afrocentric economic system, is tanta
mount to a rejection of their historic role and a betrayal of their people and
of their children. These betrayed children are the ones which criminally
assault their elders with a special hostility and vengeance. The failure of the
African American middle class to invest in African economic development and
empowerment is itself criminal.

 The adult African American population must be cognizant of the fact it must
earn the respect of its youth through expending its creative, organizational,
and economic resources in their interest, not in the interest of the youths of
other people who will one day be the enemies and exploiters of their own
children. The refusal of Black America to perceive itself as a national entity
(being under the influence of American individualism and develop an economic
system and a coherent economic policy both nationally and internationally,
means that it will remain psycho economically dependent, economically
dis-invested, and will not be respected by other ethnic groups.

Because of its refusal to invest in its economic autonomy, it cannot utilize
its very considerable potential economic clout to train and employ its young
men as well as to further its psycho political, socioeconomic interests, to
insure self-defense and survival. It must build and support the social
institutions necessary to determine its destiny and produce the types of
children and adults who represent assets and not liabilities to its well-being.
The failure of the Black community to economically invest in itself and in
America, as well as to militantly utilize its consumer power to force the
American economy to train and employ throughout its business strata its young
men and women (while passionately seeking to imitate White American consumption
patterns and engage in compensatory, conspicuous consumption) potently
encourages Black male criminality, Black-on-Black violence, drug addiction,
family disorganization, intellectual retardation, general communal
disintegration and demise.

5. A people, and a nation, is created, re-created, and sustained through the
appropriate education and training of its youth. Every culture engages in some
form of education and training, the principal function of which is to secure
cultural identity, continuity, organization, integrity and above all, survival.
When a people is mis-educated or inappropriately educated and trained, its
sense of people hood is destabilized as is concomitantly its individual and
collective psyches, and its capacity to withstand the deadly assaults and
exploitative pillaging by other peoples and the insidious wasting away of its
vitality.

African Americans are educated and trained to further the imperial and
exploitative interests of racist White America  interests inimical to their
own. They are therefore educated against their own interests, which is one of
the reasons that despite their sizeable educated, professional and trained
classes relative to other nations, their economic and political power is benign
and their survival is in question. Black-on-Black violence, criminality, social
dysfunctionality, economic instability, defensive vulnerability, can to a great
extent be traced back to African Americans not understanding the basic function
of education and of educational institutions, and permitting their exploiters
and oppressors to determine the nature of the educational experience of their
children.

Consequently, when African Americans are educated and trained under white racist
domination  no matter how highly educated or how highly trained they are
educated to serve the predominant needs of their White oppressors and thus
trained for servitude. Those left untrained, uneducated, undereducated, mis-educated
and unemployed, also are made so at the pleasure of White America. Ultimately,
a certain type of ignorance and ineptitude, a certain dumbness, regardless of
level of formal education or the lack of it, is maintained among African
Americans and Africans in general. It is by means of this fundamental dumbness
that Eurocentric domination and exploitation are efficiently maintained and
remain unchallenged.

When educated through the auspices of their exploiters, African Americans and
Africans in general are educated into ignorance, are made the recipients of an
alienated education which means that it can be utilized only to further alien
interests. Thus, the formal and informal education of African American youth is
an education in alienation, self-abnegation, incompetence, unreality and wrong-headedness.
Many of the youth, particularly the males, resist this alienating, anti-life,
emasculating and insulting process: a process designed to prepare them for
subordinate places in a racist society. They reject and refuse to cooperate with
this design, and through antisocial acts offend, tax the resources of, and
attack its perpetrators. They defend valiantly, though self-destructively, what
shreds of masculinity they have left.

They violently attack the elders and the community who and which have failed to
educate them around African cultural identity and purpose, independence,
self-determination, responsibility, self-knowledge and self-love: education for
the attainment of a fulfilling and liberated life. If African American youth
are to be educated away from their antisocial proclivities and educated in
ways that permit them to legitimately actualize their human potential and
secure the biological and cultural survival of African peoples, they must be
educated, especially during their impressionable years, by their own elders and
equipped with an Afrocentric education. Suffice it to say that if the education
of African youth is designed to primarily serve the interests of African
peoples and to maintain the wholesome integrity of the African community, such
education must be grounded in objective analyses of the African psycho
historical and psycho cultural experience as well as African future development.

Today the education of African children is one in search of a considered Afrocentric
pedagogic theory. The overarching goal and function of education must be that
of seeking to insure the survival of a people, to enhance their quality of
life, their ability to exercise self-determination and a self-created sense of people
hood, personhood, and humanity. African youth must be educated to carry out the
revolutionary overthrow of their oppressors. An appropriate education and
training of African American youth must take into consideration the
transformation and distortion of the African personality and psyche, and the
resulting distortion of their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral
characteristics which have taken place and continue to take place under
European oppression. The African American community must grasp that it has to
train its young to accomplish tasks which are diametrically opposed to those of
White American youth. Consequently, there can be no such thing as equal
education, the same education, provided to both African American and White
American youth.

The education of African American youth must be measured according to the
standards and needs of African peoples if those peoples are to leave the path
leading to self-destruction. The beneficial education of Black youth and the
African American population can only occur within the confines, and under the
control of, African American communities and institutions. The education of
African American males must occur in African American homes, churches, private
schools, preempted public schools, auditoriums, prisons, and any other places
where the truth and reality of the African history, experience and destiny can
be taught; where their teachers, their people, have a profound understanding of
the developmental psychology of the African American child, a knowledge of the
tasks they must accomplish, and can train them in how to accomplish those tasks.

The appropriate rearing and education of African American children require that
African American people recognize the inappropriateness of White American
parenting and pedagogical approaches for their children. They require that
African Americans review the pragmatic approaches to child rearing and
socioeconomic organization utilized by their ancestors, and the creation and
adaptation of new approaches where necessary. For example, the African American
acceptance of the European family model as representing the ideal and valid
model for their own family organization, despite the markedly different psycho
economical, psycho historical origins and contemporary contexts of the European
family configuration relative to that of the African American family
configuration, has resulted in the perception of the predominantly African
American family configuration as deviant, deficient and pathological. For
instance, the African Americans acceptance of the Eurocentric conception of
the fathers role in the family as the primary and only male responsible for
the training for manhood and adulthood of his Sons has crippled Black Americas
capacity to creatively train its sons for manhood and adulthood when nearly
half of its families are female headed.

A review of their ancestral history would teach them that the training of
male youth is a community activity: a responsibility of communal males, not
just that of the biological father. Thus, the absence or ineptness of the
biological African father would not necessarily have the negative ramifications
it has in contemporary Black America. A radical redefinition of manhood and
fatherhood, of training for manhood, must be undertaken by the African community
in America if its youth is to be saved, the prisons are to be emptied of its
men, the community is to decriminalize itself, defuse Black-on-Black violence,
and create a just, harmonious, secure, and prosperous African American people.

Why Crime Prevention And Rehabilitative Programs Fail

Since White America maintains its positive collective
self-concept and rationalizes its oppression of its African population by protectively
degrading all things African, it cannot be expected that it will promulgate
effective crime prevention programs. It cannot negate that upon which its psycho
political, psycho economical life depends. Its pressing need to perceive
African Americans, particularly African American males, as innately criminal,
requires that it perceives them as incorrigible and incapable of
rehabilitation. These perceptions, whether held consciously and/or
unconsciously, mean that crime prevention, rehabilitation, and other programs
and approaches designed to prevent crime in the Black community or to
significantly reduce Black recidivism, when controlled by Whites, and
rationalized on the basis of White psychology, are doomed to fail through
self-defeat. Moreover, White American crime prevention and rehabilitative
methods, because of White ambivalence toward alleged Black criminality and
Black-on-Black violence, tend to help increase, or at best not effectively
reduce, Black criminality. Hence, eurocentrically oriented corrections
facilities and criminal justice systems are often schools for crime.

It must be acknowledged that the continuing European need to dominate and
economically exploit African peoples requires that inequities of power and
privilege persist and be enforced between the supreme Europeans and the
subordinate Africans. Ultimately, this implies that fairness and parity under
these circumstances cannot operatively exist between Blacks and Whites. A White
dominated and rationalized criminal justice system, for the foregoing reasons,
must be unjust, particularly in regard to African American males. White
Americas need to dominate Blacks means that every White American institution
must operate in opposition to its implied mission and name when dealing with
African peoples. Thus the criminal justice system must produce injustice; the
corrections system must promote in correction  just as the Eurocentric
economic system must impoverish Africans.

Thus, when the White American criminal justice establishment talks about crime
prevention it really speaks to the issue of how African Americans can be
contained or kept in their places and prevented from escaping. Its chief
concern is with African American containment and the prevention of White
victimization by Black criminals. It is far from being passionately concerned
about the prevention and reduction of Black-on-Black violence and Black
criminal victimization of the African American community. This establishment is
one with all other Eurocentric institutional establishments in that they all
function to maintain White supremacy and in service to that purpose, to
maintain Black communal destabilization, or Black communal stabilization at the
price of having Blacks humbly accept (in a moral/religious, intellectual,
emotional, and behavioral sense), the places chosen for them by their Eurocentric
oppressors. As we have intimated, White America needs Black criminality to
maintain its illusory positive self-image and politico economic hegemony.

It profits economically in many ways from the processing of Black males through
its criminal justice and corrections systems and its crime prevention and
rehabilitative programs. In place of ineffective rehabilitative programs and
the necessary restructuring of American society, it stridently demands more
draconian police methods; the continuing erosion and abridgement of African
human and civil rights; an increasing emphasis on preventative detention;
construction of more and larger prisons; longer and harsher sentencing of
alleged convicts (especially Black ones); increasingly treating Black youthful
offenders as adult offenders; defunding and rendering ineffective
rehabilitative programs and services such as family counseling, probation and
parole; as well as effectively neutering proven rehabilitative approaches and
new experimental rehabilitative techniques.

Frankly, the most effective means for reducing Black criminality and
Black-on-Black violence would be the prevention, correction, and
rehabilitation, not of Black criminals, but of fundamental White racist
criminality, White-on-Black violence, both psychical and physical, and the
pathology of White racism. Black American crime is the progeny of White
American criminal intercourse with African people. But since this course of
action is very unlikely to be followed, it is necessary that the African
American community successfully undertake its own prevention, correction and
rehabilitative programs. It must take history into its own hands. While we have
stressed the production of Black criminality by White criminality, this does
not imply that Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence can only cease
when White America decides that White-on-Black violence should cease.

This does not imply that African Americans are not to some measurable extent,
responsible for the phenomena of Black criminality and Black-on-Black violence
or that the African American community does not possess the internal,
autonomous means of significantly reducing and preventing its victimization by
Black criminals and violence-prone offenders. In fact, the surest way of ridding
American society and the world of crimogenic Eurocentric dominance, imperialism
and exploitation, is for the African American community to refuse to let
sizable numbers of its constituents to be reactionary tempted into criminal,
violent and self-destructive behavior or to tolerate or justify its existence.
To a significant extent, White America is the reciprocal creation of Black
America: Whites cannot be what they are unless Blacks choose to be or accept
what they are. The relationship between White and Black America is both a
parasitic and symbiotic one: a change in one necessitates a change in the
other. And the African American community is capable of self- determined,
autonomous change!

The premise of this essay is that to a very significant extent Black
criminality and Black-on-Black violence are reactionary forms of behavior. This
implies that if the African American community is to rid itself of reactionary
Black criminality, it must expunge from its collective personality and psyche
its tendency to respond to White racist provocation of various types and in
stimulus-bound reactionary ways. It must learn not to react unthinkingly and
self-defeatedly to White racist insults to the collective African ego complex.
It must learn to resist White American material, social, economic, cultural
enticements and seductions. How Black America chooses to react to the actions
of White America determine the psychosocial, psycho economical, psycho
political influence and outcome of those White American actions, regardless of
their original intentions.

If it chooses to gain control of its own mental, emotional, behavioral and
material processes, define and regulate its own institutional systems, then the
African American community must determine the quality of its own community life
to captain its own ship and determine its own destiny.

The earnest rehabilitation of the Black-on-Black criminal must begin with the
acknowledgment that such a process must be one with full liberation of the
African community and African peoples worldwide. The alienation of the
individual African is endemically reflective of the alienation of the African
community. A community is its people. Its oppression requires the concrete
oppression of the persons who constitute it. Its permanent oppression,
subordination, and exploitation requires that its individual constituents and
the social relations which inhere between them, be organized and simultaneously
disorganized in a way such that its autonomous and wholesome existence should
never be actualized.

This is the fundamental condition upon which enduring European/White American
political- economical hegemony and White supremacy uneasily rests. Thus, the
mental and socioeconomic maladaptiveness of African individuals and peoples and
their social relations is a political- economic necessity if todays
ethnocultural status quo is to be preserved intact. It follows then that the
African American and African peoples in general must be subjected to a
deliberate and efficient program of White American/European created and
sustained socioeconomic/cultural destabilization paradigms. These paradigms are
reflected in the destabilization, confusion, alienated adjustment and
self-destructiveness of many African communities and nations.

Any serious rehabilitation program dealing with African individuals and
groups must be founded on the knowledge that the continuance of White
American/European domination of African peoples requires continued African
mental and social maladaptiveness. The social and individual ills that plague
the African American community are politically inspired. Therefore, their
rehabilitation must be politically informed and understood as a form of
political activism, the goals of which must include the overthrow and permanent
disablement of White supremacy, the root cause of those ills to begin with. The
appropriate treatment of the Black-on-Black criminal must, by the very casual
nature of his ailments, include his psycho political deprogramming and
reconstruction.

His aggressive impulses must be redirected. They must be given their
appropriate definition, causes and objectives, including above all, the
liberation of his African self, of African peoples, and the ending of White
supremacist global hegemony. To accomplish these ends he must not only
understand the social psychological and psychodynamic sources of his violent
behavior. He must be educated in the arts of self-control, social organization,
cooperation, creative-strategic thinking and behavior, self-love, self-acceptance,
and love of his people.

Black Perceptions Of White Law Enforcement

The contradictions discussed above are further complicated
by the fact that many African Americans justifiably perceive the police force
principally as an alien, hostile, colonial imperialistic constabulary deployed
against them. The forces reasons for being in the African American community
is seen as that of maintaining the racist status quo through intimidation of
the local Black constitutional, civil and human rights. They have seen the
law and its enforcers take sides with reactionary White American communities
and join with those communities in hypocritically and blatantly violating their
own legal and moral codes to maintain racial advantages.

Not only has the African American community suffered emotionally from the
violations by Whites of their own moral and legal codes; they have witnessed
the writing and enforcement of laws which are specifically designed and passed
to facilitate their domination and exploitation, their humiliation and degradation,
their subordination and dehumanization, by the White American community. This
historical and contemporary situation has bred contempt for laws and
authorities, for social mores and etiquette, and motivated open, rebellious
subversion of these entities by certain relatively small but influential
elements of the African American community.

It has reinforced criminal contempt and activity in many youth and young
adults because of the pleasure derived from outwitting the laws and their
enforcers, laws promulgated and enforced by outsiders and enemies and therefore
only to be obeyed by squares and chumps. Prestige is thereby gained in the
eyes of unsophisticated Black youth by Black-on-Black criminals who in their
perverted ways dare to challenge racist White supremacy as represented by the
laws and authorities, even if such unthinking subversion, resistance and
rebellion may ultimately prove to be self-defeating, self-destructive,
wrongheaded and pointless.

The African American Community And Improved Law Enforcement

The following conditions must inhere if the African American
community, in cooperation with the law enforcement and criminal justice
establishments, is to commit itself effectively to the support of the nations
laws, their enforcement, and is to prevent or significantly reduce criminal
activity in its midst:

 The laws must be rigorously and equitably enforced and not purposely, or in
effect, written to rationalize and protect race or class prerogatives and power
advantages.

 The laws must be consonant with generally accepted moral, valuational and
constitutional preachments and written with the mutual agreement of the people
 including the African American people.

 Law enforcement establishments, authorities, and personnel must impartially
enforce the laws and not pennit themselves to be perceived as representatives
and enforcers of discriminatory racial, class, institutional attitudes and
practices.

 Law enforcement personnel should reflect the ethnic compositions of the
African American communities they serve, and should employ at all levels a
representative number of African American personnel who possess a high level of
Afrocentric consciousness and demeanor. Those police units which operate within
the African American community, the cities and highways in general, should
possess a sound working knowledge of the culture, history, and behavioral
character of the African American community and demonstrate an earnest respect
for it.

 Police personnel should be taught to perceive and acquit themselves not as
occupiers of the African American community, not as its rulers or as enforcers
of quasi-colonial laws but as its servants, employees, as its representatives,
and who along with the members of that community are mutually and co-equally
concerned and involved in protecting its best interests.

 Police and criminal justice personnel responsible for violating the rules of
common decency and courtesy, for the use of racial slurs and epithets, for
abuse of power and authority, the use of unnecessary force, other forms of
harassment and injurious behavior when dealing with African American citizens,
should be visited with certain, swift, and effective chastisement.

 Police authorities and personnel must be equally and as speedily responsive
to the needs of the African American community as they are to non-African
American communities.

 Police personnel and authorities must serve and learn to differentiate the
criminal and non-criminal elements in the African American community, and be perceived
as even handedly opposed to its criminal elements and as zealously protective
of its citizens lives and properties, as respective of their rights and
humanity as they are the criminal elements, lives, properties, rights and
humanity of other ethnic communities.

 The police and criminal justice establishments must respect the intelligence
of the African American community and exhibit full confidence in its capacity
to know how best to solve its social problems. They, therefore, should be
prepared to actively listen to the community and diligently support its
efforts, not paternalistically and autocratically dictate solutions to its
problems.

 The African American community should by all means saliently demand the
swift, sure and effective punishment of those of its constituents who dare
victimize, in whatever manner and for whatever reasons, any other of its
members. Culprits who commit Black-on-Black crime should be aware of the fact
that the community will not tolerate, rationalize, countenance or in any way
condone (historical racism as a causal factor notwithstanding) the
victimization of one Black by another.

The African American community must rid itself of the internalized racist
belief that African life is less precious than non-African life, especially
White life. Having done this and having actively committed itself to the
revolutionizing of the police and criminal justice establishments along the
lines suggested above, as well as having committed itself to its full internal
socioeconomic, sociocultural, psycho political reorganization, the African
American community must unequivocally and loudly condemn, and vigorously pursue
the fair-minded prosecution of those Blacks who harm other Blacks, no matter
their station in life.

Recommendations For African American Community Preservation And Empowerment

The African American community must realize that it has the
right and duty to defend itself from its criminal elements if the government,
to which it pays taxes, and whose officials it helps to elect, fails to do so.
The ability of unarmed Black Muslim young men and of other Black community
organizations  with or without police support  to successfully neutralize or
markedly reduce criminal activity from some African American neighborhoods throughout
the U.S.A., demonstrates clearly the African American communitys potential for
ridding itself of crime if encouraged and organized to do so.

For approximately one-third of what a city like New York City expends to employ
its patrol forces, a comparable group of young African American males and
females could be trained and stipendiated to patrol and protect their own
communities. While White America utilizes its sons and daughters to provide
protection for itself (which is the police establishments principal function)
the African American community is not permitted to exercise that right, hence
its occupation by colonial police forces. Policing their communities would
provide very valuable opportunities for teaching young African American males that
their first duty is the protection of their people against internal and
external victimization.

The opportunity to develop discipline, work habits, appropriate attitudes
toward and relationships with authority, to learn to appreciate order, to learn
to command as well as to obey, is lost when the African American community is
treated as some dependent, defenseless, neocolonial protectorate by the White
American-controlled constabulary.

Finally, the fear that African American and the worldwide African communities
may develop their own effective internal authority system, their own autonomous
afrocentrically based organization, which could place them in the position to
challenge the hegemonic White American national and global White American/European
socioeconomic systems, motivates those sociopolitical conglomerates to actively
oppose any semblance of African American self-determination and self-defense.
For when all is told, Black self-defense and self-determination is viewed by
Whites as criminal offenses and as threats to White authority.

Thus, in the defense of its authority, the White community promotes the
defenselessness of the Black community against its own self-destruction. The
African American community  at the expense of having to confront the White
American community, the White-dominated police force and criminal justice
establishment  must not let this situation continue if it is to survive and
prosper.

Prevention of Black-on-Black criminality and violence through more rational law
enforcement, through the unbiased execution of appropriate criminal justice
procedures and the provision of effective counseling and rehabilitation
services, is not the same as the prevention of Black-on-Black criminality and
violence through the Afrocentric organization of the African American
community. While law enforcement and criminal justice systems may effectively
suppress, thwart or correct criminal tendencies, intent, and activity after
they occur, and may reduce crime in one area by deflecting it to another,
appropriate socialization of children, equitable and fair organization and
distribution of national and community resources, the provision of Afrocentric
educational training and of equitable occupational opportunities, can suppress
and redirect possible criminal tendencies, and activities before they are
actualized or can occur.

Crime prevention would then result from internal, personal and communal
processes rather than from the exertion of external, alien and ultimately
corrupting, constabulary forces. To accomplish this end the African American
community must: Recapture its Afrocentric self. For it is with the splitting
off of the African American ego complex from its African self that the tragic
transformation of too many Africans into antisocial personalities begin to take
place. Neurotic and psychotic behavior is essentially measured by the degree to
which the individual is out of touch with reality; the more out of touch with
his sociohistorical reality, the more neurotic, psychotic, maladjusted and/or
self-destructive. The African American community must confront and accept the
reality of its African cultural origins  and identity. The rejection of this
reality is the acceptance of psychopathology.

Rebuild, re-create, and create African based cultural and moral values
essential to the regaining the cultural sanity, health, liberation, and
survival of the African American and Pan-African communities.

 Build Afrocentric national and international economic, military;
technological and political systems not dependent on European consent. African
power must originate from the psycho political heart of African peoples.

 Take full responsibility for providing its children with an Afrocentric
education based on Afrocentric psychology and pedagogic techniques designed to
serve the survival and life-enhancement needs of African peoples. The community
must take over caring for the health and welfare of its constituents through
the increase and distribution of its own wealth and through the vigorous
exertion of its collective political power and influence in the U.S.A.
Accepting continuing charity from outsiders corrupts the spirit and health of a
people.

 Take the initiative and responsibility for building and providing adequate
housing and employment for its constituents.

 Make one of its central motivating goals the overthrow of European and
Eurocentric (and any other ethnocultural groups), psycho political, psycho
cultural, socioeconomic, techno-military, religio-ethical domination of African
peoples. This decrees that the African American community envision itself as a
people  a nationality  as a nation- within-a-nation, organize and function as
such, and relate to the other pluralistic ethnocultural groups as such. For in
reality, the African American community is perceived and treated as a separate,
outlaw, outcast nation. The refusal to deal with the reality of its
separateness and use it to its own advantage, to accept the reality of the
pluralistic organization of America society where each ethno cultural group is
almost exclusively concerned with its own welfare, entering alliances and
coalitions when it is to their advantage to do so, are the sources of the
African American communitys current negative and frightening vulnerability to
alien economic exploitation and to self-destruction. The survival of African
American communities cannot continue to be based on the fickle largesse and
moral turpitude, sympathy, empathy and brotherly love of the White
American community.

 Take its destiny into its own hands. The African American community must
psychosocially be born again. It must rehabilitate its incarcerated
population and itself by getting to know its true ancient, pre-enslavement,
enslavement, and contemporary history; by getting to know the true history and
psychology of its oppressors and of other peoples; by getting to know how it
was and is created and manipulated in service of Eurocentric and European
interests and, conversely, against its own. It must recognize that it is
possessed by an antagonistic eurocentrically introjected spirit, a spirit with
which it self-destructively identifies and over which it has little or no
control, and which directs its collective personality in opposition to its true
purpose and character. It must recognize that every thing originates out of a psycho
political milieu, possesses psycho political purposes, has psycho political
implications, emanations, effects and ramifications. The understanding of these
phenomena and their application to the reconstruction of the African American
community, to correcting the incarcerated African American population, to the
rearing, guidance, education and counseling of African American children, will
provide an indestructible foundation upon which African liberation and the
liberation of humankind can be re-constructed and realized.

The Image Of The Black Community Is Horrendous In The World. The Image Of Black Men In Particular Is That Of A Bestial Maniacal And Savage Group Of Persons. Minister Louis Farrakhan